Onward in my Underclothes, or The Hard and Beautiful Days After Cancer

March 14th of this year marked two years since my last chemo treatment and in a few weeks I’ll celebrate two years of being cancer-free. You’d think I’d want to shut up about it and move on, right?

This is one of those things that people with cancer intuit on a level that most other folks don’t: there is no moving on. 

Okay, that’s a little heavy-handed, of course I’ve moved on. But. 

In my life I have been unlucky about many things (having cancer at 45 being at the top of the list) and I have also been tremendously fortunate in other ways. One of those is that I have not yet lost someone very close to me, other than grandparents who lived long lives. The superstitious side of me doesn’t like to even say (or write) that out loud, like I’ll remind the universe and it will strike someone down just to smite me. I tell you this to acknowledge that I’m making a comparison without visceral knowledge of a feeling, only an adjacent awareness – that living as a cancer survivor in many ways is like living with grief. 

I had a friend who’d lost her mom in her 20’s describe her grief to me, and it went something like this: it’s like underclothes, something you wear always, under everything else, never really taking it off but also not showing it to the world. I have read about it as, once the shock wears away, a new persistent presence in your life – one that some days will flare and knock you sideways, and other times just fade into the background at a steady hum.

Almost two years after the cancer was removed from my body and I began the healing process, I still think about it every day. Like when I consider taking another drink and I quickly remind myself of my risk factors; or after a shower when I look in the mirror at my fading port scar and the tiny radiation tattoos speckling my torso; or just in passing, for no reason at all. 

Today was one of those days when the most acute version of that feeling is unavoidable, a knock-you-sideways kind of day. It was a Scan Day. 

I have them twice a year now – an annual mammogram and ultrasound, followed by an MRI six months later. The heaviness on these days presents most obviously like anxiety and fear, which starts bubbling up days before in the form of dread. Scan Days cloud my whole week, looming in my calendar like one of the four horsemen. 

Is this going to be the day they tell me it’s back? 

On Scan Days I sit in the mammography waiting room – shivering with the other women in our disposable robes under the blasting air vents (must be a man controlling this climate) – trying to distract myself, and occasionally slipping into planning mode. If it’s back, I’m getting a mastectomy. If it’s back, I won’t tell everyone right away. If it’s back. If it’s back. If it’s back. 

Life after cancer is both harder than it was, and more beautiful. To settle into the day-to-day disquiet of hormonal side effects and regular re-screenings, knowing that I’m always at elevated risk (though the more years that pass, the lower that risk becomes) – that’s a way of life that I have been thinking about since the day I was diagnosed. It’s one of the little sadnesses, like the shadow of a life that once was breezed through confidently in its health, and never will be again. A life that will always feel – even just a little – precarious.

One of my favorite podcasts is Criminal, hosted by the silky-voiced Phoebe Judge, and I’ve turned my family onto it, so we often listen to it together on long car rides. (No, it’s not a salacious true crime podcast, but rather thoughtful storytelling.) My son and I were listening to an episode yesterday about two pickpocket magicians who are married. Toward the end of the interview, Phoebe asked them, and I’m paraphrasing, “Do you feel like you’re impossible to breach, like no one will ever be able to pull one over on you?” I found their answer kind of profound. They said they felt like their only superpower was really the knowledge of their own vulnerabilities. Many people march through life thinking nothing can touch them, but it’s a real strength to know exactly where your own weaknesses are.  

My vulnerability to this disease is an inescapable and constant disruption in my life, but it’s also kind of a superpower. My eternally heightened sensitivity to my own mortality is both a reminder to take f#cking great care of myself (as I’ve written about), and it’s like putting the “vivid” photo filter on my life; while my health will never again be taken for granted, neither will the minutes and hours of all the days I have left. I have a reimagined relationship with time: I’m both grateful to have any at all, and monstrously impatient about having any of it wasted, constantly trying to maximize it and squeeze all the life possible out of every heartbeat. The finite nature of it is more stark for me. When death becomes visible, life becomes glorious technicolor.

Scan Days are hard, but when they end well they’re beautiful. Today in New York spring announced itself with warm patches of sun and a gentle breeze. Around 1pm I walked out of a building filled with people sitting in those cold waiting rooms, or laying stiffly in huge magnetic tubes, or getting news that will change their lives, some of them being made rudely aware of how little time they have left. 

But not me. Not today.

My step was a little more buoyant and my mouth was slightly turned up at the corners. I stopped for a bowl of ramen on my way to my train – a little gift to myself for another Scan Day behind me. It was the best bowl of ramen I’ve eaten in a long time. 

Moments like this – when the pendulum swings back in my direction – make me slow down. They remind me that my iron grip on my health, and my relentless hold on life can get in the way of my actual enjoyment of it. That it can be enough just to slurp ramen and people watch. To walk through the streets of a city that I love, on my way home to a family waiting to hug me with relief in their eyes. To ease up on my pace, having been given the gift of More Time, breathing deeply with the reassurance that for today, I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay. 

So, onward. In my underclothes.